William Gay - Provinces of Night

Why did he run you off?

You know that crazy whore he married? That little Mathis girl? I was down here drinking homebrew and playing poker. Everything was copacetic till she started giving me the eye. Standing behind me rubbing on me and looking at my cards. Before you know it we were in the back room with her drawers off and Early throwed down on me. Run me off. Hell, it ain’t been six months since I give her ten dollars there in the alley behind Baxter’s. I told Early that. That’s my wife you’re talking about, he said. Well does that mean the price’s gone up, or down? I asked him.

Neal raised the trunklid with a flourish, gestured in a manner curiously theatrical, a carnival barker presenting his show perhaps, a salesman his apothecary of exotic drugs.

Where’d you get it? Early peered into the trunk, leaning precariously on the wooden leg he’d never gotten used to. They stood grouped about the trunk in the drizzling rain, the boy wiping water out of his eyes with the tail of his shirt. The aforementioned whore stood in the dry on the porch and watched Neal sullenly, slateyed and enigmatic as a cat.

The yard where they’d parked the Buick was full of all manner of fowl, ducks and gamecocks and guinea fowl, all alike sodden and disconsolate in the rain. An arrogant guinea hen kept fluttering to the roof of the Buick as if to roost there and Neal kept slapping it off.

This whiskey came out of keg county itself, Neal said. Hickman County. I’m running some for a fellow over there, Herman Tiptoe, and last night he was a little short and paid me in whiskey. I got no use for this much whiskey, but I can always use money.

Early rubbed the gray stubble on his jaw. I expect you’re going to tell me it was chartered in oak kegs.

I am not. I don’t know where it’s been, but I doubt seriously if it’s ever seen an oak keg. I do know it’s a lot better than that popskull shit you peddle. Try a little knock of it.

Fleming watched Early tilt a jug back and drink. Early’s neck was skinny and stringy as a turkey gobbler’s, his fistsize adam’s apple pumping the whiskey down. His eyes looked wide and wild as some startled animal’s. Fleming turned away and looked at the girl. Her face had the stunned vacuous look you’d see in a mental hospital, as if life had dealt up a card so high and wild she could not handle it, that had caused her mind to reel away in shock.

Early lowered the jug. His eyes looked slightly out of sync. It’s not so bad, he said grudgingly. Neal rolled his eyes up at Fleming and turned away laughing. What was you askin for it, Early asked.

Neal assumed an expression of businesslike sobriety. Twelve dollars, he said.

Early lowered the trunklid. I can’t use it, he said. I sell it for seventy-five cents a half, you know that.

I might go down to ten. Sell it to them for a dollar, tell them it’s bonded, they won’t know the difference.

They settled at ten and even helped Early carry the jugs to the edge of the slope. I’ll take it from here, Early said. I’d ask you in but I don’t never want you in my house again. I wasn’t speakin about you, young feller, he said to Fleming. You perfectly welcome to come in and visit a while.

Fleming didn’t know what to say to this so he said nothing at all. When they were halfway to the car Early called to Neal, you watch them chickens. You run over a duck when you hauled out from here the other night. People ain’t got no respect. People do a onelegged man’s chickens anyway.

COMING INTO the county from the west you drop off a long hill that slopes toward the river, where lush black bottomland leads you down to the swift yellow waters of Buffalo. You cross on a high steel span of bridge rusted to a warm orangebrown, and almost immediately the blacktop begins to ascend again into steep broken hills. Sometimes there will be a boat on the river or kids fishing from the banks with cane poles.

The day E. E Bloodworth returned an old man had oared a skiff into the calm water away from the current and was casting near a bed of cattails. Old man in a straw hat, light off his glasses when he looked up at the cattle truck and raised a friendly hand. Bloodworth waved back, and the old man was gone somewhere beneath the beams and girders, but Bloodworth took the wave as an omen and felt in some obscure way that he’d been welcomed back from exile.

They were climbing now, Coble gearing down for a road that not only climbed steeply but curved hard to the right. They were climbing the highest spot in the county, and Bloodworth turned in his seat to study the countryside out the back glass: it fell gracefully away in soft green folded hills, the river wending its way through it, and looking west the horizon diminished into other horizons layered behind it as far as the eye could see.

Bloodworth was almost home and he was touched by exhilaration so sharp it was almost pain. For the last fifty miles the country had had a familiar look to it that gave him a calm feeling of comfort that almost succeeded in allowing him to forget that in the next thirty minutes or so he was going to have to come up with a herd of Black Angus cattle.

He looked back at the road, glanced at Coble beside him. He was sorry he had not simply ridden the bus. For hundreds of miles he had listened to Coble’s autobiography until he felt he knew Coble and his genealogy better than Coble did himself. Coble loved to talk and no subject suited him better than Coble. He had come up from nothing and made a small fortune by using his head and keeping his eye on the ball. Nobody ever got up early enough in the morning to put one over on him. He was well thought of in his hometown. Without actually saying so he left the impression that everywhere he went in town he was carried on the shoulders of cheering compatriots. That when he left town things shut down and stores did not even bother to open until his return. Women found him wellnigh irresistible. Women began flinging off their clothing at the faintest rumor that he was even within screwing distance, and would not settle for second best. Had the old man possessed so much as a jackhandle he would have leapt upon Coble sometime during the night and beaten him into unconsciousness, let the truck go where it might.

Up here on the left is a place I need to stop a minute, Bloodworth said, thinking: up here on the left twenty years ago is a place I need to stop. It may be blackened ruins, ground scraped by a bulldozer, a Baptist church.

Stop why? We need to roll, oldtimer. I need to get them cattle loaded and get gone.

There’s a beerjoint right up here got the coldest beer in the county. I been nursin a thirst for the last fifty miles.

We’ll pick up a sixpack when we get to town and drink it on the way to your farm.

I got to take a leak anyhow, Bloodworth said. Less you want to float the rest of the way into town.

The high wood gallery of Goblin’s Knob rolled into view through a stand of loblolly pines, and the old man felt almost dizzy with relief.

Hellfire, Coble said. He pulled the truck onto the cherted parking lot. There were no other vehicles on the lot and the old man was trying to see was the place open. Or even in business anymore. The gray clapboard building looked in a poor state of repair but it had looked that way twenty years ago when the old man rolled past it outward bound.

He fumbled up his stick and climbed out, looking about to see was there anything he was forgetting. There was not. Travel light, travel fast.

Bring me one of them beers you was braggin about, Coble called.

Bloodworth nodded and struck out toward the Knob. It may not even be Sharp anymore, he cautioned himself. But inside he knew it was Sharp. He could always tell when he was on a roll.